They
are the Russian Panthers - Be'er Sheva high school students fighting racism
against immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They are fed up with hearing
ever-present phrases like 'stinking Russian' or 'Russian whore.' With the
apparent suicide of a 13-year-old immigrant last week, authorities are
starting to listen.

By Lily Galili

A
small article in the newspaper last week reported the suicide in Be'er
Sheva of a 13-year-old girl "who was having difficulty adjusting" to her
new country. The small size of the news story conceals a much larger tragedy
and the chilling fear that fills the young girl's immigrant friends with
dread."The other kids at school bothered her, just like they bother me,
because I am Russian," said Meirav Frolov, 17, in a strangled voice. Frolov
is one of the core activists of the "Russian Panthers," a group of teenagers
who are struggling against the racism directed against immigrant youths.

"It could have been me," says Frolov. "But they don't listen to us.
The mayor, Yaakov Turner, said we are inventing a phenomenon that doesn't
exist. Now there is a body. They have proof."

The
fact that the circumstances of the girl's death are still being investigated,
and that it may not have been a result of suicide, has not lessened the
anger or the pain of her contemporaries. Even if the girl did not kill
herself, but died of cancer, with which she had been ill in the past, the
truth remains that she had attempted suicide one month ago. The girl came
to Israel just six months ago with her mother, and since then her life
had been difficult. Other students at school had ganged up on her, and
one boy even wrapped a tape from an audio cassette around her neck and
tried to strangle her. She was so afraid that she would not sign up for
the school's dance club, even though she had been a gifted dancer in Russia.
The school sent her to see a social worker, but the social worker didn't
speak Russian.

Frolov
relates that the girl and her mother came to Israel at the girl's initiation.
"I am Jewish," she would tell her mother over and over. "I need to be in
Israel."

-
"She was a real Zionist," says Frolov. "Look what they did to her in this
country, where she wanted to be so much. And her poor mother. She had only
one daughter, and now she is an older woman all alone. She won't be able
to have any more children."

Michael Dorfman

Ha'aretz met with
the Russian Panthers in Be'er Sheva the day before the death of the immigrant
girl. The central core of the organization consists of 11 teenagers, who
are joined by some 70 others for activities. The meeting was attended by
Frolov, who came to Israel from the Ural Mountains three and a half years
ago; Anton Weintraub, 14, who came here from Uzbekistan nine years ago;
and Anna Bronovsky, 15, also from Uzbekistan, who has been here for six
years. They were accompanied by the group's mentor, Michael Dorfman, a
journalist who founded the first local Russian-language paper, and who
also works in public relations.

Nothing
in the appearance of these young people hints at the difficulties through
which they are suffering. They are alert and pleasant, and all are equipped
with cellular phones, which they chatter into all the time. In their case,
however, the cell phones also serve as communicators in the battle they
are waging. About six months ago they officially organized themselves into
a nonprofit association and named it The Rising Panthers (in Hebrew, the
word for rising also means to immigrate to Israel), though they have been
nicknamed the Russian Panthers. They based their name on the original Black
Panthers of the 1970s, a left-wing Sephardic group who took their name
from the U.S. Black Panthers.

No
one can accuse Israeli society of being static and unchanging: The Black
Panthers of the 1970s rose in protest against the wave of immigration from
the Soviet Union and the benefits awarded to the immigrants at the expense
of veteran Israelis from Middle Eastern countries. One of the main slogans
of their struggle was "Villa-Volvo," referring to the fact that the new
immigrants all seemed to be able to afford a new house and a new car, and
the Black Panthers' efforts did bring about a real change in Israeli society.
Thirty years later, a group of young immigrants from the former Soviet
Union has organized to protest the racism against them.

"We
wanted a strong name," explain the teenagers. "We looked for something
that would arouse fear. The Black Panthers caused a revolution in Israeli
society, and in their time they were treated just as we are being treated
now. We are also fighting racism, and we are planning to start a cultural
revolution, but without the violence that characterized their activities."

Golda
Meir said that the Black Panthers "were not nice boys." In the spirit of
the new political correctness, the establishment today cannot say that
the Russian youngsters are not nice, but it can still ignore their complaints.
At practically the same time that the young girl's body was found in Be'er
Sheva, Yakov Turner was appearing on local television to claim that there
wasn't a real problem, that Dorfman was trying to manipulate public opinion
for his own purposes.

He's
not nice

Turner
told Ha'aretz that Dorfman, who had worked with the immigrant population
in his capacity as a member of Turner's election campaign staff, was "a
frustrated man who is attempting to make an issue where there really isn't
one, a politician who is trying to accrue political wealth for a purpose
that no one understands. He blows things way out of proportion. I asked
him to bring me proof of his claims of racism and violence against immigrant
youth, and he was evasive."

This
"not nice boy" is also part of the story of the Russian Panthers, even
though it is the enormity of the problem that has made him what he is.
The Panthers of the 1970s had gimmicks whose main purpose was to attract
media attention. The Russian Panthers already have an Internet site, through
which they appeal to Russian-speaking communities the world over, and have
received support and advice such as, "Fight back. Set up martial-arts clubs
and learn how to fight."

At
the same time, this bigotry has also found its way into the virtual world
of the computer. Anton Weintraub, a computer buff, recently participated
in an interesting chat meeting. His chat partner asked, "Where are you
from?" Weintraub did not understand that the other boy only wanted to know
where he lived, and answered, "I'm from Russia." The other boy typed back,
"I have to go now," and cut off the conversation.

These
things do not happen only in the online world of the Internet. During the
meeting in Be'er Sheva, each one of the three teenagers related dozens
of racist incidents that had happened to them personally. These incidents
ranged from unpleasant practical jokes on the buses to insults and curses
and attempts to steal their cell phones or break the phones' antennas.
Many elderly immigrant women have been mugged on the streets or have had
their purses snatched.

"Stinking
Russian" has become a byword, almost as much as "whore" has become linked
with "Russian" in reference to any immigrant teenage girl. "I have been
in Israel for [almost] four years, and every boy thinks that every Russian
girl is a whore," says Frolov. "After four months in this country, I joined
an Israeli class in school. During recess I joined the other kids, and
suddenly they started to insult me: 'Stinking Russian, go back to Russia.'
There is not one of us who has not suffered these taunts, which have become
routine."

The
Russian teenagers say that such insults are hurled at them even when their
teachers are nearby, and the teachers say nothing. Once, after one of the
teachers forbade some immigrant children to speak Russian among themselves,
they scrawled graffiti on the school wall: "We survived Auschwitz, we'll
survive the school." After that incident, Dorfman assembled a group of
immigrant students and, after a short discussion on the definition of racism,
sent a few of them out to collect and document instances of racism. The
results: In one year the students uncovered 192 racially motivated incidents
in the southern region, 146 of them in Be'er Sheva. Sixty-eight of the
incidents were accompanied by physical violence.

No
ghettos, please

Weintraub
mentioned that once it was possible to wander around one of Be'er Sheva's
most troubled neighborhoods alone. Today, people only venture out in groups.
"As soon as they [Russian immigrants] see an Israeli, they know that there
are going to be problems," says Weintraub, who is still "Russian" even
though he grew up in Israel. The nonviolent incidents are no less difficult
for the teens. It is hard for them to accept that they are not allowed
into the only discotheque in Be'er Sheva. Native Israelis can go in, but
we can't, they say.

"The
guard at the entrance told me straight out: 'You're not going in there.
You're Russian.'" says Frolov. "There are no places for Russians here.
If I were Moroccan, I would say something and go right in. We don't say
anything and we just walk away."

Racist
overtones are also evident in the immigrants' conversations. Their talk
is filled not only with their own deep feelings of suffering, but also
with a measure of arrogance, that they are above the very society into
which they so yearn to be accepted. When they talk of the cultural revolution
they want to start here, and asked what they want to contribute to the
society, they say, "Manners, respect, an interest in books and learning
in general that is missing among Israelis, who don't even know what a globe
looks like."

This
is also how they speak when discussing the Black Panthers. They use them
as a role model, but only up to a certain point. "We are more cultured,"
says Anna. "Can you imagine us hijacking a truck full of candy and distributing
it among the poor immigrants?" Everyone laughs at such a crazy idea, which
is a parody on the Black Panthers' hijacking of a milk truck during the
1970s.

Even
if most of the violence and scheming is done by the Israelis against the
immigrants, the negative stigmas are not the lot of one side alone. The
meeting in Be'er Sheva was also attended by Netta Shabi, a biochemistry
student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva who has been
paired up with Frolov in a program in which university students help troubled
youths with their homework and other problems. Netta, who was born here,
said that she was shocked by the racism in Israeli society, which she discovered
only through the Russian immigrant teenagers. "I didn't know it existed,"
she said.

The
immigrant students are greatly distressed, not only by their difficulties
in coping with their own problems, but also by the distress of their parents,
who are unable to help. When Frolov would be beaten up at school, her mother
would come, but was unable to speak the language. One of the complaints
voiced by the students is the exclusion of the Russian immigrant parents
from the parents' committee.

This
problematic reality sometimes creates surprising situations. Weintraub
relates that a Russian drug addict once threatened him in the street. He
was sure that his father would berate the addict. Instead, he heard his
father saying, "We immigrants must stick together, and not attack one another."
The feelings of being threatened and rejected by Israeli society unite
the ranks in a distorted way.

"Racism
is a structural phenomenon in society, not a sectarian one," says Dorfman.
In the meantime, the association has won great exposure from the Russian-language
media during its first few months of operation and has attracted the interest
of a number of academics, but the establishment continues to ignore it.

Only
after the death of the immigrant girl last week did the mayor of Be'er
Sheva suddenly summon the immigrants' representatives on the City Council.
Now Turner says that he just recently learned that there are no Russian-speaking
social workers, and has asked someone to do something about it. Three of
Be'er Sheva's deputy mayors have now been put in charge of handling a problem